Dusk. Before the House of Arum,Hay, half-moons, and hay. A fire floats like linseed oil across the horizon. Homelessness. A sacred grove. Women gathered with birdseed and clay.first chorus
For what you ask us, if we hear you right—
Then it must be winter. True,
there are things we’ve seen not made of this earth:
in the ice, the strange cry of a calf
clings to the river’s borders. But young
is not the strangest beloved, in the old fields,
on the old roads, where no one watches
the wind but watches its trail— the tail
of a Blue Norther, Lord, known to knot an ewe’s wool
before it’s shorn, fastest in its extinguishing. No,
we were not quiet in our old hearts.
In the sudden cold of our bedchambers and blackened
noons, in the night’s known but exquisite spying.
second chorus
Ten years since the first winds walked
across these yards. Ten years,
the woman who watched her husband walk west,
watching the Cimarron’s water— And we,
the wives and mothers of strangers,
of men who watched their farms and families
fail, the men who spent crops
for hills and salt water— Who should say
the night knows only their bleakest, ghost-filled places?
We saw the night beat into our strongest
barns—yes, bleating— our daughters shrouded
in linen and hay. Our men now dead of Dust
Pneumonia, our men now dread as the cattle’s faces.
A speaker steps forward from the first chorus,adorned in deerskin and face paint. She faces the women, hearing some sound beyond the clearing—a distant wailing, from somewhere within the woods.speaker
I know a man mauled
by the first kicks of a calf in Spring. Sister,
he said, Sister— there are spaces
where the water runs the length of a sober man.
first chorus
He said, Sister, a sober man.
speaker
He said, Sister, there are rivers
where the calves crawl like crabs across the sand,
rivers which covet the coins
placed upon men’s eyes, and walk
with a man’s children, and drink with the man’s wife.
second chorus
He said, Lord, the man’s wife.
speaker
He said, Lord, there is water
where the wind eats
the sparse and nameless things— its secret looks,
Lord, the laugh of lean pasture,
and riverbeds red as the cattle’s racked meat.
chorus
A grave and curious quiet, Lord!
What carvings in dirt and death are these?
What wind wound through the ash and apple trees?
And hieratic, holy, the hymnal woods—
What water prepares our coming? What rains
will spare our fields? We’ve known what the river
finds in its feeble sleep: When there was winter,
there was mistle-thrush. God-rush. There was thistle.